


Decoy, Protection, Bodyguard (Armor Remix)

by ninety6tears



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Middle Ages, Chivalry, F/F, Protectiveness, Remix, Undressing, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-03 22:08:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20460263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/pseuds/ninety6tears
Summary: How could a single woman hold herself with a calm burden that reminded one of how numerous the hearts and minds of the entire world? She had seen perhaps one hundred faces in her small village life, and that life opened now with purpose at this one new set of eyes.





	Decoy, Protection, Bodyguard (Armor Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Wavesinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Decoy, Protection, Bodyguard](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11848599) by [The_Wavesinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/pseuds/The_Wavesinger). 

The lack of ceremony was close to what Sabé had expected. She could not count herself worthy of some reception in the throne room as if this were typical in a meeting with a new member of the guard, even if her position was an unusual one. Being shown right into the private chambers still gave her such an unmoored feeling—she needed more time, she was unprepared; she could not possibly belong. But she wandered in, and there wearing silks in such deep colors that pulsed through the air, rising from an elegant chair, was the princess. 

From what she'd been told, Sabé almost expected it would be like looking in a mirror: a ghostly chill that would remind her of the peasant’s myths about doubles meaning portents of deaths, gooseflesh on the back of her neck at this impossible ghost in motion.

Padmé's eyes met hers in a slightly sad smile, and the recognition was something much more powerful, much more warm. Sabé's soul came still in sudden belief of her own beauty, in everyone's beauty. How could a single woman hold herself with a calm burden that reminded one of how numerous the hearts and minds of the entire world? She had seen perhaps one hundred faces in her small village life, and that life opened now with purpose at this one new set of eyes.

Speechless, she bowed her head.

"Hello," Padmé said gently. Her voice was diplomatic, yet informal; Sabé remembered that they were alone. "As I'm sure you know, I am Padmé."

"Sabé, at your constant service, milady.”

Padmé considered her, for a brief moment as intensely as if she were more a painting than a person. "I've been told you are already well trained. If that is true, the luck would seem uncanny. We couldn't be twins, but...sisters, certainly.”

"I am honored, but I have much to learn," Sabé replied in reflexive modesty. "In the ways of court, and the duties of regency…”

“No one could have been appointed fully prepared for this position. It's good that you understand that.”

“Yes, milady.”

“You can call me by my name, please. To start with...” Padmé changed into an eager glance, saying, “You'll certainly have to know your way around the grounds. Shall we ride?"

Miss Nala had had a map sent for Sabé, of course, with many notations relevant to her duties, but feeling the place with one's footsteps or horse’s hooves painted the more palpable picture. Padmé gave Sabé a palfrey she had so much obvious vested affection for that Sabé wondered if it could be the one she usually favored for riding. This fact touched Sabé with such lingering warmth that it was all the more awkward when she was forced to correct her, in the only manner in which she was qualified, when Padmé wanted to steal into the wooded paths well south of the main grounds.

"There could be anyone on the public roads and I'm your only guard. Our particular association is better kept to a low profile with your other handmaidens. If I'm forced to protect you, a witness would complicate things...”

For a second Padmé's disappointment made her appear so tired that Sabé was reminded of that lonely light to her expression when they first met earlier; her eyes cast back around the privacy of the inner kingdom, as if it all looked small, but then landed into a polite look at Sabé. "I would argue but I can already tell you would only insist on a rule you believe in.”

Padmé had brought a bow and some arrows for target practice. She was apparently early in learning, but it didn't take long for her to take a few apples off of a tree that must have been more than fifty paces away.

“I promised Glois from the kitchens I'd try to bring him a pheasant, but I haven't seen many,” she thought aloud. “It's too bad the apples come in so bitter, but there are good berries on the bushes along the groundskeeper cabins...do you like them? We'll pick them on the way inside.”

They did, while Padmé interviewed Sabé on details of life she had never had conversations about with anyone. “I love the wind in my hair but perhaps you don't? I suppose I'll have to get it cut much shorter to match yours and then we'll grow it out together. All the handmaidens will, it's less conspicuous that way.”

Sabé frowned. “They'll all have to?...Oh, won’t they resent me for that?”

Padmé seemed about to reassure her, but then an honest rueful look interrupted it. "I'm afraid they probably will, a little bit.”

A pause, and then a laugh broke from Sabé. "It must seem ridiculous to worry about that, out of all the things I have to take on.”

"Their duties are simpler than yours. They'll recover.”

To Sabé's surprise, Padmé had been willing to lift up her skirt to create a cloth basin for as many berries as they could find, and so Sabé had volunteered to carry her bow and quiver and kept circling back to her with picked fruits. Now she had an arrow knocked but idly at her side, having missed a bird’s quick flight from a high branch into an obscuring of vines across the clearing.

The darkening glisten of Padmé’s hair and skin told of dusk’s coming, somehow accentuating her inner fire when she was pleading playfully:

“—the best one, the reddest one. You pick.”

Cheerful, maddened, Sabé freed a hand to pick a berry worthy of a painting, its color blushing between the deepest crimson and softest pink, and offered it to her charge who had no free hands, whose lips nearly closed around her fingers for a single blink of time.

Padmé made a pleased sound as she ate it. The tiniest trace of the juice stained the corner of her mouth. She licked at it and looked back.

Always aware of any moment’s possible danger, always picturing the flight, Sabé’s heartbeat came urgent just now for no reason at all. She imagined an enemy's whipcrack and the murder-red rain of the berries falling down to Padmé’s boots, her hand enclosed in hers as they ran, as they escaped together.

The next motion would have drawn some quick practiced instinct in any case, and the arrow stuck the pheasant out of the air before Sabé was even aware she’d turned, knocked, aimed a kill at the sudden movement up into the darkening air.

Padmé smiled but Sabé was only standing and panting. She was overcome after her own vigilant startle, the way her senses had strengthened, it seemed, in only a few hours of knowing the princess, her awareness gone sharper with new aching.

And Padmé’s smile, she saw, was complex. Sad again, but something else was in it this time which Sabé thought was especially for her, a fissure where her own lightning had struck.

Many of the guards did have long hair, but all the men at arms in Sabé's village traditionally wore it short, so she'd cut hers back at the age of twelve when she left home, skinny and hungry, to declare herself a prospective squire and she'd never looked back. She refused to entertain comment on the exception of her sex, and that worked well enough for her knight, who simply made a jovial show of not realizing she wasn't a boy for her several years of training under him. He made her accept just about any challenge to combat or marksmanship, so she quickly got used to having to win.

Despite her many small victories, her expectations had been very low. Even among the strongest men, knighthood was most often reserved for sons of nobility and influence. She liked the idea of being a guide for travelers, experiencing different towns, perhaps finding smaller occupations as a bodyguard along the way; there were always women of wealth who might prefer her company to a man's. But she was serving as a member of a night’s watch that earned bread and cheese rather than money when the two men came with Nala alongside them. They found her in her usual supper tavern as if she'd planned to meet them there, took turns examining (squinting, staring) and interviewing her with little explanation until finally disclosing that they came all the way from the royal capital and had an exceptional proposition to make her.

Miss Nala's true office had never been defined to Sabé. Once Padmé's nurse, the woman made it difficult to imagine her occupation had never been one of double wielding. She was two steps ahead of any intrigue that might be detrimental to the princess, and she'd been trying to hatch some form of covert extra security now that Padmé was more involved in politics.

"How much did you hesitate?" Padmé asked Sabé one time, two moons after her arrival. They were lying on their backs behind the hedges, gazing at the stars while the guests for a banquet were murmuring on just beyond the garden doors.

"You assume I did at all," she replied, but gave it thought, her hand smoothing down her skirt. "It wasn't out of fear that I had to think on it."

"But it was something else?" Padmé prompted.

She hesitated quite a while. “The fact is I was very afraid I wouldn't get along with you. I didn't know how you would relate to me. I thought I had to be a last resort—I come from nothing.”

“No one comes from nothing. But you couldn't expect someone in my standing to understand that.” Padmé had sat up to lean back on her arms; her voice rang gently in the rich dark. “And you were only a last resort after I encouraged the men to look beyond the noble families for another handmaiden. It was when someone brought back the rumor that there was some maiden in armor who looked like me that Nala began to wonder how far we could go with the decoy contingency. I have to say I liked the idea right away—I've never been comfortable with the notion of someone taking danger in my place—but I never knew I'd find someone who could protect herself as well as she must protect me.”

“I protect no one as well as you,” Sabé corrected.

Padmé lay back again. “...I was afraid to meet you too,” she said quietly.

There was something secret, something breathless in how she didn't continue or elaborate, didn't have to. Her fingers had brushed Sabé’s over the grass. Sabé swallowed and moved her hand back over her bodice.

Padmé rarely spoke of the suitors, but naturally they came in abundance. She was ripe for a diplomatic match and had to start planting the social seeds, Sabé knew this. She was anxious whenever one seemed to be weeded out of the frequent invitations and correspondence, knowing this might gradually continue until there was only one left.

Sabé wanted someone to sit her down and tell her what this meant for her. Whether marriage would mean that the princess would take or leave the throne, or would leave Naboo country entirely depended on a number of things, and surely whether she would feel the need to have such an involved bodyguard in her employ also depended on the state of where she ended up. And a married queen retaining handmaidens in such constant company would be very irregular—not that Sabé really served her in that function behind closed doors, but she would endure such a demotion if it meant she could still be near her, watch out for her. Know her. 

But Padmé would have to ask it of her.

It was altogether Padmé's choice, whatever she decided was best. Sabé wished that someone would tell her if that should be a relief.

The sunnier season of Sabé's arrival had long faded into a crisp autumn, and a first snowfall fell outside the windows of the hall as the crowds strived to dance and drink the chill away. As was increasingly expected at the gatherings, Padmé had spent most of the evening between two of the male guests. Over time the other handmaidens had earned deep affection from Sabé, but on this night she resented their simple surly boredom, their conversations about who was the most handsome.

What was pressing on her a reminder of the new state of things most of all was Padmé, almost frightening in her stone-faced haziness brought on by the wine. Not only the wine. She excused herself for the evening with a final long sip and accepted Sabé's arm to help her up the stairway as she so often did, but without the usual mischievous whisper of the thing she'd been waiting to tell her, without even the question of how Sabé had liked the feast or the performers.

It hadn't just been today. Could the change have been so gradual that Sabé hadn't seen it fully? It was hard to even define it, this new seriousness, when Padmé had always been soberly burdened to some degree. The worst part of it was the instinctive knowledge that Sabé saw more of it than anyone else, as if in moments of low weakness, Padmé could only simplify the connection between them to its most basic purposes.

In moments that were fleeting but solidly painful, Padmé was beginning to shut her out.

Since it looked like they wouldn't spend several minutes talking as they usually did before retiring, Sabé was out of sorts in the isolation of the chambers after the door was shut behind them. With a sigh Padmé sat at her armoire and began letting down her braids while Sabé lingered at the snapping fireplace. She could smell the scented oil Padmé applied to her hair every night, closing her eyes against a new relentless quake of familiarity and yearning.

She heard the clink of the oil bottle being put back next to the perfumes. Padmé muttered, “You could stay in here tonight if you like. Some of the visitors might even find it odd if none of the handmaidens do.”

The invitation felt coldly absent.

“Here I thought you couldn't bear me,” Sabé said, daring, testing. “Milady.”

She looked to see the smallest motion of Padmé’s shoulders falling. Padmé stared forward a moment, then stood and came to the center of the room in an even decisive manner. "Attend to my clothes,” she said.

Puzzled, Sabé went to her chest and didn't have to root much through it before finding a thinner shift she often wore to bed. She unsteadily laid it in a neat fold onto the bed and then looked down, hands clasped.

A short pause. "These," Padmé corrected, her voice suddenly brittle with something as she held up her heavy sleeves, and in a heartbeat Sabé understood.

“I never…”

She _had _never. Padmé rarely asked of her the conventional duties of a handmaiden. Sabé had never braided her hair, drawn her bath, fetched her tea. She had never helped her undress.

Their glances met, mutually tensing and breathing through the fire’s splashes of fervent light, and her confused protest died unworded.

She started with the cords that laced up from her wrists to the looser sleeves at her shoulders, pulling the stiff cuffs free. Padmé turned and she worked on the various ribbons that fitted her mantle, loosening it to a bell shape that slipped up like a dark cloud along Padmé’s arms as she lifted them, and now there was the fur collar to untie at the back and as it came off Padmé’s chemise fell low on her shoulders; in certain spans of the firelight the cloth was translucent, the pale hushed pallor of the skin like a pearl underneath. _Am I being punished_? Sabé thought with a frantic ache. _Why would she push me to this?_

The chemise was a snowier cloud along the same path, and Padmé stood naked and facing Sabé again, arms crossed over her breasts in a shiver. But they were both shivering, and it wasn't just the chill.

It could barely even occur to Sabé that she was supposed to fetch the shift from the bed now. The stiff moment was all wrong to her, something pleading and desperately vulnerable in Padmé’s eyes as she stood there completely stripped. Sabé should be the one naked and shaking while the other kept the cloak. She should be the one laid bare.

Without thinking she stepped closer. There was a kind of grand exhale as their faces were close, just for a moment that would have to pull away like a fickle breeze. Their eyes locked into each other, communicating nothing except the same unspoken thing.

_Ask me. Ask me. Ask me._


End file.
